Tag: recipes

Let me present you with my very first tutorial video: how to make your own lip balm. The recipe is incredibly simple and very customisable. This recipe is inspired by these lip chap recipes that I wrote about on Urban Earthworm (but even more simplified).

Here’s a few other points to keep in mind:

You can buy beeswax online, or if you can get in touch with a local beekeeper, that’s even better! Look for beekepers in farmers markets or try looking them up online and contact them directly. If you go through a personal beekeper, the beeswax will probably be cheaper than online – some even hand it out for free! At the same time you support a local entrepreneur, and you can be sure where your wax comes from.

If you are vegan, or don’t want to use beeswax for other reasons, you can substitute the beeswax with a vegetable wax, such as carnauba, candelilla, jojoba or soy wax.

This lip balm recipe is good for one small jar of lip balm but you can easily double the amount to make more at the same time!

Pick any essential oils that you like, some suggestions are: peppermint, rose, lime or other citrus fruit, lavender.

Hope you like the video! And let me know if you have suggestions for other YouTube tutorials 🙂

A few weeks back, I wrote about what to do with leftover beer. This time, there’s another alcoholic drink that you could put on your face instead of in your mouth. Although, I would recommend doing both, preferably at the same time.

This face mask combines red wine and chocolate, two of the best ingredients in the whole wide world. And they are not just good for eating – using these red wine and cacao powder in skin care will give you clear, young looking skin. Red wine contains an antioxidant called reservatol, which is proven to have anti-aging and acne fighting properties. Cocoa powder also contains heaps of antioxidants and will work great for anti-aging and help fight acne, eczema and other skin disorders.

Red Wine Chocolate Face Mask

For any skin type, especially mature skin or acne prone skin. If you have very sensitive skin, use with caution.

1 tbs red wine

1 tbs cacao powder

about 1 tbs sour cream (or yogurt, or other thick dairy product)

Combine all the ingredients. How much sour cream you use depends on how thick the cream is. Start with a bit less and add until the consistency is to your liking.

Okay, so imagine a scenario where you find yourself with an extra can of beer. I know, I know, it doesn’t necessarily happen all that often, at least not in our household. But for the sake of argument, let’s just say you do. What to do with said can of beer? Well I have the perfect solution for you – put it in your hair! It’s true – a beer hair rinse will actually give you very shiny, smooth hair and even gives your hair nice volume and body. A beer hair rinse will also enhance natural curls and give life to dull hair. After reading this post, I bet you’ll go out to buy a batch of special hair-rinse beer.

In the beginning of May, the people of Sweden were in panic. A few nights of frost meant that the strawberries might not be ready for midsummer. And a Midsummer without Swedish strawberries is not a proper Midsummer!

Luckily, there was no cause for alarm. The strawberries are ready and we can go out and celebrate a proper Swedish Midsummer.

But strawberries are not just a tasty reminder of summer, they are in fact very nutritious and good for you! And things that are good for you to eat, are probably also good to put on your face. I will now share a few easy beauty recipes with strawberries. Just put a few of the more squishy strawberries to the side and use them on your face instead of eating them!

When buying strawberries, make sure you get local, preferrably organic, strawberries. Strawberries are actually one of the fruits that are the most toxic when bought non-organic.

One of the products that people are most fussy about is their deodorant. And who can really blame them? Sweat, and sweat smell, is just the kind of thing that you want to not have to worry about during the day.

However, many of the storebought antiperspirants contain several ingredients that you really don’t want to use. The main cause for concern is aluminum salts (often aluminum chlorohydrate), which is the very thing that takes care of the whole antiperspiration in the antiperspirant. Unfortunately, aluminum also has proven links to Alzheimer’s and is suspected to be linked to breast cancer. Add to this the fact that aluminum is strongly irritating for skin, and, you know, the fact that it actually closes up and blocks your sweat glands, meaning the stuff that was supposed to exit your body stays inside.

But fear not, you can make your own homemade deodorant – and it really works! Read on to find some recipes that are so easy you’re not going to beleive it.

You take a first look at it, and it might not look like much. Light brown in color, a bit dirty looking, with a stamp in arabic on the top that you might not understand. It might be quite unevenly cut and you might find it lying in a box with tons of others, without any packaging. You pick it up, and it smells of earth and hay. But then you might cut it open, and you will be greeted by a beautiful deep emerald color. And then you might use it, and your will fall in love.

The product I’m talking about is one of the oldest cosmetic products there is. The traditions of Aleppo soap making is over a thousand years old, and is by some considered to be the first hand soap ever made.

With its mild soothing and cleansing properties, oatmeal is one of the best cheap ingredients that you should always have in your beauty pantry. I’ve previously written about oatmeal’s properties, with a few recipes, but there are so many great recipes out there apart from these. That’s why I decided to gather a few from some of my other favorite green bloggers.

A couple of years back, I wrote about how to make your own aloe vera gel from aloe vera leaves. In this tutorial, I used the leaves as they are, just cut them up and put them in a food processor. But there’s a couple of problems with doing it this way. First of all, you will still have som green larger pieces in your gel, which doesn’t work very well if you want to use it as a hair gel or as an ingredient in lotion etc. To make this work, you would have to strain the gel to get the larger pieces out. Secondly, there are some who claim that the green part of the leaf shouldn’t be used and can in fact be toxic. In any case, the green parts of the leaf doesn’t really do much good, it’s the gelly substance on the inside that we want.

I’ve been aware of this, but haven’t really found a good way to get the gel out of the leaf. In many instructions, they just say that you should press the gel out, but that hasn’t worked for me at all. The other option was to cut the green parts out with a knife, but then there are till lots of gel left on the green parts that are wasted. But the other day, I found a really effective way of getting the gel out.

One of the ingredients that should be in every DIY beauty crafters cupboards is rose water, or another herbal water. Rose water is exactly what it sounds like – roses steeped in water, where the good components of the rose has soaked into the water. The great thing about these herbal waters, or herbal hydrosols, is that they are very versatile. They can be used as such as a face toner, or in a hair rinse. They can also be used in any recipe instead of water, and in that way you will get a lot of benefits from the hydrosol, instead just a filling agent (which water is). According to Livestrong, rose water is a mild antiseptic and is good for all skin types, especially sensitive skin, red and irritated skin as well as acne skin. In this post, I will discuss how you can find quality rose water in the shops, and how to make your own herbal hydrosols.

Did you read my 7 days acne treatment, in which I praised the acne-fighting properties of African black soap? Did you go out and buy yourself one? If my last post didn’t convince you, here’s some more info about african black soap that I’m hoping will convince you.

Sidenote: African black soap is mostly produced Ghana. Even though I think the name “African black soap” is a great example of how western-centered we are I’m going to call the soap African black soap in this post, simply because that’s the name it commonly goes by (at least in the western parts of the world). Also, I have no idea how you’re supposed to spell “ghanaian”.